Reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate
Comment on these students post. The post are related to an article and to have better understanding of what the students are talking about you can read: https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate
The comments are to be informal and simple, 50-70 words or more, you agree/disagree/have another opinion, ask questions to expand conversation.
Student One: MA
A place where I applied the reengineering process was in my diet. So basically, for the past year, I had a goal to lose 20 pounds. I tried different diets and exercise routines, but they were all very similar. The one thing I was not doing was counting my calories. I was eating clean, exercising regularly, but I was not keeping track of my calories. Then, one of my friends told me how it was very important to have caloric deficit to lose weight. He said that you need to count your calories and make sure you take in less than your body needs so that you lose weight. To me, this was a complete change. I broke away from my usual diets and turned away from my old rules and started with a brand new approach, which is what reengineering is. One of the principles of reengineering is “organizing around outcomes, not tasks.” What this focuses on is making sure people have their eyes on the big picture instead of just focusing on small tasks. I think the way this applied to my diet was I had to make my diet more of a lifestyle, not just a diet. Instead of just looking at the food I was eating, I had to focus on everything I was doing, including my rest, exercise, work and see how all this had an effect on my diet and weight and make adjustments.
Student Two: JR
Currently at my place of employment, we are undergoing a reengineering of a business process that we have done the same way for years. Hammer’s comment really hit home when he spoke about how technology has been used to mechanize old ways of doing business instead of innovating and radically redesigning business processes. Historically our production teams have communicated with appraisers providing services for our business electronically. Their communication touch points occur during the assigning process, obtaining status on orders, as well as dealing with escalated issues. There are teams for each touch point. Often times there are hand-offs to other teams who handle the specific issue that arise. This old way of doing business is in opposition to Hammer’s first principle which is centered around organize around outcomes not tasks. In light of this principle, as a business we recently decided to radically reengineer the way we look at the tasks. We are moving to a process where we organize around the outcomes, and link parallel activities. We are accomplishing this in a similar manner as MBL did. In the case of MBL, they instituted case managers to see the application through the entire process. In line with that, we are creating positions and training team members to interact with the appraiser throughout the entire process instead of passing them off to various teams to handle different issues or questions occurring at varying touchpoints. What we hope to gain from this is more streamlined communication, better relationship building, and reduced turn times resulting in a more competitive business.
